Inner Life 5: Port

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There was no point in trying to find my cousins by analysing behaviour. After all, the first thing I’d done upon waking up was kill one of them.

The best first step would be to see which bodies had had a chance to actually become implanted. After Trigger’s disastrous attempt to implant Spanner Ann and everybody being on alert for ovipositors, I could be fairly certain that nobody had been implanted since the initial conflict. So the question was, who had had contact with my kind aboard the Penetrator?

I used subtle hormone control to encourage my body to discuss the attack with crewmates as often as possible. This was tricky, since not many of them wanted to talk about it. But I was able to patch together a story.

The Penetrator had been dead in space when the crew had arrived. This had been unexpected, but it looked like the enemy had left and the crew apparently really needed the artefact, so after a brief discussion, they’d boarded.

The three security personnel – my body, Trigger, and Shadow – were on the docking pod, as were the head engineer (Sinner) and the medical assistant (Scalpel). The last two were last-minute additions because the ship was unexpectedly wrecked. The Penetrator crew were all apparently dead, the ‘bug aliens’ had escaped containment, and the crew did their best to avoid them , fighting where necessary, on their way to the artefact. Sinner died in the conflict shortly after securing the artefact; the rest made it back onto the docking pod only to find that it had been severely damaged by a couple of Penetrator crew members who had apparently survived the slaughter. The survivors were seemingly unconcerned about their escaped alien captives (the crew hadn’t known what to make of this at the time but it was obvious, upon reflection, that these Penetrator survivors were my cousins), but were able to pull off a dramatic escape, repair their sabotaged pod, and return to their own ship (which was named the Lucky Star, incidentally). They took heavy fire from the Penetrator, but the crew still aboard the Lucky Star were able to return the favour, and the heavily damaged, critically understaffed Penetrator was destroyed.

What the mission team hadn’t noticed in the excitement were the two aliens hiding aboard their pod. They managed to get aboard and come in contact with the three crew members crowded in the docking bay to receive the returning team. They were the three crew who had no mission-specific duties – Pots, Goldie, and Spanner Ann. The three surviving security officers were already injured from the mission (and honestly, my body was probably low on energy since I would’ve been digging in and growing at that point), and while the damage was a lot lower than it could’ve been, Trigger and Scalpel died before the threat was neutralised.

Which meant that my list of potential cousins was Shadow, Pots, Goldie, and Ann. The rest of the crew were a threat by default. Those four… were only a threat in high likelihood.

It was something. Though it would be kind of sad if Spanner Ann had already been implanted. It would mean that my cousin had been exposed and killed for nothing. There was no point in trying to implant a body that already had someone in it – it was impossible, in fact. We had natural defenses against that kind of thing; implantation changed a host so that it would reject future implants. The new embryo would die before integrating into the nervous system no matter how weak, or even dead, the first embryo was.

My first glimpse of a larger human habitat (that’s what this species called themselves, humans) came when we pulled into port to replace the damaged docking pod. It was a huge metal construct, round-ish but bumpy, covered in various coloured lights that blinked at different rates and orbiting a planet like a small moon. The whole crew packed into the tiny cockpit to watch through a huge window as Lav the Nav steered us past a series of blinking lights and, after a brief code-laden exchange with people inside the station, over to a long arm sticking out of the station and through a huge door, and with the help of some robotic arms attached to the station, set the ship down in a vast, mostly empty room.

“Engines off, we’re docked,” Lav announced. While the rest of us gazed out the window, Lav’s eyes were firmly on the screens and instruments. “It’s safe to disembark.”

“Priority is the new docking pod,” June said. “Sinner, take Trig – uh, I mean, Spanner, take Shadow with you, for safety. Check with the Gun for budget. Everyone else, you know the drill; have fun, but don’t draw any attention to the ship. Be ready to rendezvous and disembark within fifteen minutes if we have to. It’d be just our luck to have another emergency.”

My body and Shadow exchanged a quick glance that I didn’t know human faces well enough to understand yet, but I felt a jolt of adrenaline as our eyes met. “Actually,” my body spoke up, “I’ll go with Ann. Trigger’s still got some security protocols to check up on and the ship shouldn’t be left with them half-done.”

“Great,” Ricky Danger said, clapping its hands together. “Let’s get our business done here as smooth and quick as possible, so we can get this mission done and head on to bigger and better things.”

“Can we try smaller and better things?” Spanner Ann asked. “Just for a bit. As a change.”

“Let’s get this done as smoothly as possible so that we can get this mission done and chill out for a while with smaller and better things.”

After changing clothes and stocking up with some random small gadgets that I mostly couldn’t identify, my body disembarked with Spanner Ann. The room that the ship was in was noisy with random bangs and hums from nearby rooms, as was the wide corridor it lead into. But at the end of that hallway, we stepped into a much smaller room where we had to type some identifying information into a computer, and only after we did that did the door on the other end of the small room open, and then we moved into the base proper, which was alive with different sounds.

We moved into a vast room the width of our entire ship, and four or five times as long. I knew that spaces could be big, of course; I had pre-birth memories of all kinds of environments, and I’d seen the outside of this station, so it wasn’t like I’d been unaware that there might be large rooms inside. But experiencing it for myself was entirely different. I instinctively reacted with adrenaline, causing my body to tense up and start looking around for the threat, confused and on edge.

Whoops. I was going to have to be more careful.

“Marge?” Ann asked.

“It’s fine,” my body said after a moment. “I think. We should get moving.”

The room wasn’t empty. Tables were scattered around the place, some of them in tiny pseudo-rooms of their own made with thin partitions, and behind them, people waited. Some of them had one or two people, some more. Sometimes, other people wandering through the space would approach a table, and have an animated discussion with someone behind it, and sometimes they would read and write on papers together or look over something on a small handheld computer, or exchange small items. Most of the tables had signs over them that I couldn’t understand. Many also had different sorts of items scattered over them; toys and trinkets, clothing, tools. These were the things that were occasionally being taken away by the people wandering through the space.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out the situation. We were on this station to buy something. And this was obviously some kind of trading spot.

My body’s panic was increasing rapidly without my input, and I didn’t understand why. I immediately pulled my attention back to let it deal with the threat on its own, and it wrenched its eyes away from the sign that I had been trying to decipher, breathing rapidly.

“Marge?”

“It’s fine. Let’s keep going.”

My body started to calm down, scanning the area, and only then did I realise my mistake. I’d wanted to keep looking at the sign, so I had. I’d taken control of the eyes and not even noticed it. Clearly, my body had.

I couldn’t get carried away like that. I had to be more careful.

We didn’t go to any of the traders’ tables. Spanner Ann headed straight through the room without slowing down, and I followed behind, my eyes (not under my control this time) scanning the area. They lingered on a group of four humans in dark blue jumpsuits with bright red badges, carrying weapons. I couldn’t make out the shape of the badges (they were too far away), but my body nudged Ann. “King’s Guard.”

“Not because of us?” Ann’s voice, like mine, was very quiet.

“I doubt it. If they were screening for contamination, they wouldn’t be wandering around the port; they’d be on the doors, and probably not in uniform, or at least not in King’s Guard uniform. Might be a new import law or something? Sometimes they like to make an appearance after busting a major smuggling operation.”

“You’re worried they took down R – our client?”

“It’s be really annoying if we went through all this and then didn’t even get paid.”

The King’s Guard didn’t even glance at us as we headed through an unmarked door into a narrow side corridor and took several turns into different halls. I didn’t bother trying to track where we were; my body clearly already knew, I didn’t need to consciously memorise it. Some of the doors we passed were labeled with signs I couldn’t read. Some weren’t labeled at all. Occasionally, we passed someone crossing our corridor or traveling in the other direction.

The further we walked, the more decorated the corridors became. The clean metal started to sport fancy designed painted on them at apparent random in glaring, mismatched colours. Some of them were pictures – clumsily drawn spaceships, some kind of fuzzy animal shaped vaguely like a human but walking on its hands as well as its feet and with a long tail and stretched-out face, a really detailed image of a pink human with no clothes on. Others were intricate designs, that might be maps or might be words or might just be random patterns; I couldn’t tell. There was a mix of precise, detailed pictures and clumsy, uneven scrawls, both of which appeared more and more often as we walked until the walls around us were completely painted.

We also passed more people as we went, and their clothes became more worn and less well fitted. Most of them didn’t look at us, and the ones that did didn’t look happy. I found myself walking with one hand on my gun at all times.

We turned down a narrow hallway lined with idewntical strudy doors each with a metal plate fixed to the front. The plates had different words etched on them, and many were damaged (or sometimes missing, leaving a discoloured patch and a couple of screw holes behind), but were identical in size and shape. Spanner Ann stopped at a door and tapped a fist against it a few times.

“Unlocked,” called a voice from within. Ann opened the door, but my body quickly slipped in front to enter first.

The small room inside looked enough like the living spaces on the ship that I could tell what most of the big things were for. A couch took up most of one wall, with a long dining table in front of it. At the head of the table was a wheeled chair, the space at that end set up like a desk – notepad, some pens, some kind of handheld computer. That desk area was the cleanest place in the room; not because it looked like it had been tidied, but because everything had clearly been pushed further down the table. Everything in the room was covered in stuff, only some of which I could identify. A lot of it was obviously rubbish – food packets, mostly. Some of it might not be – random electronics, boxes of paper and tools, a pile of folded rags that had fallen over and gotten half-buried in cans and old dishes at some point. And in the wheeled chair sat a human.

It looked about average height, dressed in a faded green jumpsuit that zipped at the front, except the zipper was broken. Underneath, its white shirt was stained and had a couple of tiny holes in it. The human’s face was covered in short, wiry hair, but the top of its head was bald. Interesting choice; most of the humans I’d seen had bald faces and hairy heads.

“Ms Oram!” it greeted us with a wide grin. “And the lovely Ms Seed. Mr Sinn busy today, I presume?”

“He’s dead,” Spanner Ann said, and the grin faded.

“Oh, fuck, Annie. I’m sorry.”

“We’ve got a trashed docking pod. We need a replacement. Our budget is spit and dirt, and our standards are ‘will technically pass a spaceworthiness inspection’. Can you help? We’ll trade you the old one for scrap.”

“This is an ask-no-questions kind of situation, isn’t it? I’ll see what I’ve got. You got the specs on the trashed pod? The scrap value will tell me what options I have in your budget.”

Spanner Ann pulled out a small handheld computer, and the two exchanged data and talked about engine specifications for a while. I couldn’t pay too much attention, because my eyes were wandering, and I was concentrating on not getting too interested in anything and unthinkingly grabbing control again. The absolute last thing I needed was to panic my host. I’d created an aversion to medical checkups, but that wasn’t going to count for much if I slipped up and had it thinking that something was seriously wrong.

My eyes landed on a rumpled sheet of paper, and my heartrate leapt. My hand shot out, smoothing it, eyes scanning text I couldn’t read and inspecting the photograph of an unfamiliar human face. “What’s this?” my body asked.

“Hmm?” The human who lived here glanced over. “Oh, yeah. The crown prince has gone missing. Whole place is crawling with King’s Guard.”

My whole body was tense, saturated with stress hormones, but my voice was casual. “Ugh, that’s why. How long?”

“Couple of weeks. The whole thing’s a pain. Anyway, Ms Seed, I can go as far as…”

While they kept negotiating, my hands quickly folded the paper and slipped it into a pocket. I could feel my lungs and heart fighting; part of my body’s nervous system was trying to breathe slowly, and another part was hammering my heart as quickly as possible. The negotiations finished, and Spanner Ann and I left.

“We should head back to the ship,” my body suggested as Ann closed the door.

“You don’t want to look around for some trinkets first?”

“The King’s Guard might be here for the prince, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t notice other things in their search. You really want to be wandering around a port crawling with them? The rest of the crew are probably already waiting for us.”

“Yeah,” Ann sighed, sounding disappointed. “You’re probably right.”

My heart still wasn’t slowing down. I didn’t know what this crown prince was, but my body was very, very upset about it.

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